If as an employee you have been less than efficient in your role and compounded that by being generally difficult/dishonest/workshy etcetc then surely its in my interest know that?

I wouldn’t suggest anyone doing anything outside the law but maybe more transparency would result in happier employer/employee relationships. There is nothing more destructive for a team than to have a bad egg in their midst.

Lets face it in these trying times surely the disciplined productive workers deserve a bigger bite of the cherry than those who have been disruptive and openly aggressive towards their employer?

I just feel that the good guys deserve better and that the bad guys deserve everything they get.

Ernie, absolutely but the person sacked for misconduct has no reason to tell you why they where sacked or offer that job/manager as a referee.

I don’t have a beef with unions or people doing the right thing, indeed there should be some protection for people who have been wronged due to a position held in any union BUT should the same umbrella be held over people who use their union for trouble making and wrong doing? It is not beyond belief that that a union rep my do something they shouldn’t for personal gain or to cause problems unneccesarily for the employer.

I have spent/wasted plenty of time compiling cases against employees who done the dirty when they shouldn’t have even got to the interview stage due to past misdemeanours. Yes we could have just sacked them but you need to be very careful and cover your back.

Like I said I am in no way against people doing the right thing by their co-workers but there are 2 sides to this story. Why do you think these big businesses risk getting caught out. Is the penalty for using the blacklist less costly than ignoring the info on it?

For all you attempts to come across as ‘holier-than-thou’ olie, I find it astonishing that you should be defending construction companies which knowingly break the law.

I would be interested to know how you would feel about moving into an office or a house built by a company which freely flouts the law. Or are you selective about which laws construction companies should ignore and ride roughshod over ?

Why did they do it ? you ask – because they thought that they can get away with it, is the obvious answer. And up until now they were right. For decades the construction industry has operated blacklisting, but this is the first time that I’ve heard of any companies getting their comeuppance over it.

What makes these blacklisting cases particularly ridiculous is the fact that all the big boys mentioned in the reports hardly employ anyone at all – all their work is sub-contracted out. It a measure of how extreme, vindictive and nasty, these construction companies are that they should even go through all the bother of illegally employing the services of a blacklisting company.

And as I have already mentioned, it is extremely easy to sack a bad worker in the UK. The worst that can happen is that it will go to an industrial tribunal (which is very rare) and there it will be upheld anyway.

Furthermore, it is perfectly legal in the UK to sack someone unfairly in their first year of continuous employment – you can sack someone if you simply don’t like their choice of socks. Something which many employers use, i.e. they automatically sack their employees as their first 12 months comes up.

Due to the casual nature of the construction industry, a very high percentage of workers will have worked less than year anyway. And of course very few workers in construction are actually PAYE, most are self-employed or agency, so sacking them a piece of p1ss.

But you don’t have a problem with sacking people, do you olie ? What you’re much more concerned about is that you think some people should never be offered a job in the first place. Anyone who has ever been sacked from a job should never work again, for the rest of their lives, according to you.

And whilst you claim that you quote, “don’t have a beef with unions”, you are quite happy to defend a blacklisting company which blacklists people for nothing more than being in a union. I’ll remind you that being in a trade union is internationally recognised as being perfectly legal.

I don’t know if you’re an employer olie, but as far as I’m concerned with your contempt for the law of the land, I don’t reckon that you’re fit to be one.